Follow by Email

Wednesday, 24 February 2016

I’ve never been a very
ideologically-minded Reform Jew. I have never seen myself as a ‘salesman’ for
the Reform brand of Jewish self-expression. I think of Judaism as a three
thousand years old religious and cultural civilisation, a rich and
multi-coloured tapestry of belief and practice with complex theological and
intellectual and emotional and spiritual threads woven into it: the ideology of
Reform Judaism, progressive Judaism, might be a distinctive set of threads in
the overall, ever-expanding weave of Jewish civilisation, but temperamentally I
don’t feel myself motivated to keep pointing out the softness and sparkle of
the red threads as opposed to the coarseness or dullness of the blue threads.

But this week I have been
thinking in particular about Reform Judaism’s relationship to blood. I saw that
a motion was put forward to the Church of England’s synod to make blood
donation (and organ donation) a specific responsibility incumbent on all
Christians - a ‘mitzvah’so to speak. Given that only 4% of the population give
blood regularly and the NHS need another 200,000 donors a year, this is an
important move by the Church, if they are proposing to actively promote it as a
religious duty.

In Judaism blood donation is usually seen as a mitzvah, and
even in traditional halachic circles it is viewed as something between what is
permissible and what is obligatory.

But Judaism has a curious,
complex , ambivalent relationship to blood. And Reform Judaism more so. Most of
the sections of Torah that Reform Jews in the UK read in its three-yearly cycle
manage to avoid the blood – or at least the bloodiest parts of these sacred
texts, where the writers describe the rituals that were a normal, regular part
of the Temple cult.

Take this week’s sedrah, T’zaveh, which stretches from Exodus
27:20 to 30: 10. We never read the verses about the consecration of Aaron the
High Priest and his sons, where a ram is killed ‘and you take of its blood, and put it on the tip of the right ear of
Aaron, and on the tip of the right ears of his sons, and on the thumb of their
right hand, and on the big toe of their right foot, and then you splash the
blood against the altar and round about. And then you take of the blood that is
on the altar, and the anointing oil, and sprinkle it on Aaron and his garments,
and on his sons and their garments, so that he and his garments shall be kadosh, holy, and his sons and their garments
along with him’ (Exodus 29: 19-21). That holiness was achieved through this
blood-based ritual is not something that (for better or worse) Reform Judaism
wants us to be exposed to, or have to think about.

Next year, when we reach this
sedrah, we will hear about the first part of the ritual, before the ram, which
involves killing two bulls ‘before the
Lord, at the entrance of the Tent of Meeting’ (29:11), whereupon ‘you take some of the bull’s blood and put
in on the horns of the altar with your finger, then pour out the rest of the
blood at the base of the altar’ (29:12).
So even in the ‘edited highlights’ version of the Torah text that we
read in Reform circles for this parashah,
you can’t avoid the blood completely. But, on the whole, we omit these
blood-soaked verses. Our tapestry of holiness has holes in it, so to speak.

Part of me approves of this.
I do appreciate that Reform Judaism distances itself from some of these more
problematic passages that the Torah contains: problematic in that they confront
our modern sensibilities head-on. Historically, this goes right back to the
origins of Reform Judaism in Germany, 200 years ago in Seesen, then Hamburg,
then Berlin. Cuts were made in the liturgy to edit out all the traditional
references to the Temple, and all the prayers which hoped for the restoration
of the Temple, and its sacrifices. Not all the ancient Temple sacrifices and
rites involved blood, the slaughter of animals and birds – but a lot of them
did. This was a clear ideological move
by the early Reformers : it wasn’t an evolution, it was a revolution -
to drop the ancient hope for the rebuilding of the Temple.

And the Reform branch of
Judaism has never deviated from this position, whether it was in Germany, or
the United States, or here in the UK. Contrary to traditional strands of Judaism, we don’t pray
for there to be a restored, Third Temple – thank God, I want to say. In fact we
might pray that we hope we never see a Third Temple - particularly (but not
only) because it would have to be built on the site currently occupied by the
Dome of the Rock. And if Jews started to demolish that sacred building because
of these archaic texts we wouldn’t see a Third Temple, we’d see a Third World
War.

So my Reform Jewish blood
runs in opposition to that whole ancient cult of the Temple and its sacrifices
and all that spilt animal blood.

I am fine about studying these ancient texts
as a part of the history of our people, I’m fine with finding ways – as the
later rabbis always did – of interpreting them symbolically, but I’m convinced
that our understanding of holiness has moved on, and the whole question of how
an individual can be in a living relationship with God, with the divine, and how a people can be bound into a covenant
with Adonai, the Holy One, I’m
convinced that this quest for holiness now lies in a different direction from
the blood rituals that these Torah texts hold dear.

In other words I’m with Rabbi
Yochanan ben Zakkai, from the generation of rabbis that saw the Second Temple
laid waste, who comforted his grieving colleague Rabbi Joshua. Joshua was
distraught that ‘the place where the sins of Israel were atoned for is
destroyed.’ ‘There’s no need to grieve’, said Rabbi Yochanan, ‘There’s another
way to atonement and to be at-one with God as effective as the Temple: it is
deeds of love and kindness. The prophet Hosea has already said’, says Yochanan,
‘that God tells us: “I desire mercy - and not sacrifices”’.

Another way to holiness as
effective as the Temple – deeds of love and kindness. Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai – the first Reform Jew. He
comforts his colleague by making the imaginative and spiritual leap – that
ethical action is the way to serve God, to be close to God, to be bound into a
covenantal relationship with God. Holiness doesn’t require blood to be spilled.

But blood, the theme of blood
in Judaism, has a way of seeping out. The word comes more than 350 times in the
Hebrew Bible, and it is as integral to Jewish life as is the circulation of
blood to our own bodies. And this omnipresence is made beautifully clear in a
remarkable little exhibition now on – you can catch it until February 28th – at
the Jewish Museum in Camden. It’s called simply ‘Blood’ with a subtitle
‘Reflections on what unites us and divides us’ and it made me think about the
extent to which Judaism is pre-occupied with blood, historically and to this day.

The first mention of blood in
the Bible is put into the mouth of God, and the context is an ominous one: ‘The
voice of your brother’s blood cries out to me’, says God to Cain after the
murder of Abel. And blood keeps cropping up at key moments in the unfolding
Biblical story – Joseph’s coat is torn off him and dipped in blood and taken
back to the distraught Jacob, a symbol of its use to deceive; the blood of the
paschal lamb smeared on the doorpost in Egypt is a sign of the Israelite homes,
a symbol of its use to separate out the Hebrew people, and protect them. And
then you have Sinai and all the laws of Judaism around blood. What areas of
life does it impact on? Circumcision, kashrut, the laws of menstruation come
immediately to mind. And there are sections in the exhibition devoted to all these.

And then there’s the way that
Jewish identity has traditionally been passed on through the mother (at least
until very recent changes in Liberal and
then Reform Jewish practice), which effectively makes Judaism a religion that
follows the blood line. This notion of ‘Jewish blood’ is a powerful fiction –
but a fiction that in the 19th and 20th centuries was
given a veneer of pseudo-scientific
respectability through eugenics, and as we know it was a fiction that
ended up in genocide. Ironically, Jewish scientists were as enthusiastic in
promoting theories of race as everyone else.

One of the most chilling and
provocative artefacts in the exhibition is the chart from 1935 of how the
Nuremburg Laws, ‘For the Protection of German Blood and German Honour’ were to
be implemented. It shows how marriages or sexual relationships between Germans
and Jews were forbidden, but the chart shows how this question of racial purity
through the blood line needed to be traced back to grandparents and
great-grandparents in order to determine who was a kosher ‘German’, so to
speak, and who wasn’t.

Nuremburg also features in
the exhibition with a 15th century woodcut illustrating the medieval blood libel – one of
the central themes of the exhibition is the way in which so much of the fraught
relationship between Jews and Christians centres on blood. There is a real
psychological drama within Christianity rooted in the experience of, as it
were, drinking blood - through the wine’s transubstantiation, Christ’s blood is
made present. This is a kind of horror story dressed up as religious ritual. Incidentally,
I think that the blood libel is a projection of this horror onto Jews, who are
accused of using blood, Christian blood,
in rituals like matzah baking. In a related crime, it is Jews who attack
the wafers used in Mass and make blood come out of them – host-desecration - and
the exhibition also illustrates this lesser-known part of the history of
Christian hostility to Jews around the theme of blood.

So there’s lots to look at
there, lots to ponder on – and I haven’t mentioned the section on vampires and
Dracula and the Jewish connections to them, including the box of breakfast
cereal produced in 1987 in the US called Count Chocula, with a jokey box
illustration of Bela Lugosi’s Count Dracula with a Magen David around his neck
– the makers recalled the product after a threat of legal action from the
Anti-Defamation League.

But the trope of Jewish
blood-suckers goes back a thousand years: it takes in the history of usury and
goes right up to the anti-Semitic cartoons of Der Stürmerwhich you can also see at the Museum.

Once you have been to this
provocative and informative exhibition you can’t help but notice how central is
this theme of blood to so many aspects of Judaism, Jewish history, Jewish
ritual life, Jewish social life, positively and negatively. It’s integral to
the tribal identity of Judaism – and it’s part of the rhetoric and iconography
of anti-semitism through the ages.

Reform Judaism may shy away
from some of its manifestations, it may edit out some of the Torah’s more
difficult texts, it may have a more relaxed attitude to kashrut, menstruation
rites, even circumcision – it may want to concentrate on the ethics and the
spirituality – but I have a nagging suspicion that this is cheating us of some
of the richness, the complexity, the ambiguity of our long and bloody history.

The Jewish story has blood
running in its veins just as Jews have blood running in their veins. Shakespeare , as so often, said it best: ‘If
you prick us, do we not bleed?’ The Merchant of Venice is a play about blood,
Christian blood and Jewish blood, and what these phrases/concepts really mean,
or if they mean anything at all.

Do you think there’s such a
thing as ‘Jewish blood’? Even if you don’t, most of the world does. I sometimes think that Reform Judaism would
like to promote itself as a bloodless religion, a religion of ethical living
and celebration and gentle religious observance , a religion of the mind and
the soul, and the heart – as long as the heart is a metaphor.

But if we turn away from the reality,
the physicality, the oozing, flowing, coagulating viscosity of actual blood –
human blood and animal blood - that courses through the veins of Jewish life and Jewish texts and Jewish
myth and Jewish history, I suspect it will come back, vampire-like, to bite us.

[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, February 20th, 2016]